


and unto dust you shall return

by trashsenal



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Crisis of Faith, Roman Catholicism, and uses it as a security blanket of sorrts, as a vigilante, catholic guilt i guess, catholic matt is my favorite matt, i think he's just confused by it, is he really questioning his faith tho, to yknow justify his actions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 11:37:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6004471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trashsenal/pseuds/trashsenal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Movement pervades the congregation again as people start lining up for the ashes. Matt waits for everyone in his pew to get in line before getting up himself. The scent of ashes from the last mass hangs in the air like a storm cloud. Like the frankincense, it’s heavy and earthy, but it also smells of fire and leaves. Repent and believe in the gospel, the priest says, dipping his thumb into the ashes and smearing it across Matt’s forehead, repent and believe in the gospel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and unto dust you shall return

**Author's Note:**

> I was SUPPOSED to post this on Ash Wednesday, but I'm a good Catholic and went to church, so it's like almost a week late, srry. Anyways, please give kudos and leave comments!

_"Remember you are dust, and unto dust you shall return." -- Genesis 3:19_

It's Ash Wednesday and every Catholic in Hell's Kitchen is at mass.  
  
There's irony in this, that a neighborhood named Hell's Kitchen is full of practicing Catholics, but perhaps this circumstance is the dichotomy, the color, of the city personified. There isn't an empty pew to be found at St. Mary's Catholic Church during the six o'clock mass, but the pious don't seem to care; there are people standing against the walls, outside in the lobby, and they’ve parked their cars a good three blocks away from the building. Yes, it does indeed seem that every Catholic in the Kitchen (and the rest of Manhattan) has come out for the ashes.  
  
There are some genuinely pious people in the congregation tonight. The woman sitting next to the baptismal fountain is going through a difficult divorce, and is asking the Lord for strength to go on. Two pews behind her, a man prays, his head hung in his hands, because his young daughter was diagnosed with cancer earlier today. A teenager sitting in one of the wings is praying that his mother doesn't get deported back to their country because he has four younger siblings and a dead father.

And then there's Matt Murdock. He sits in the very back, at the edge of his pew, with his face half-hidden in the dappled lighting of the church.

A bell rings, and the heavy scent of frankincense fills the room like rising smoke from a fire-- it's thick, earthy, and coils around the churchgoers in invisible tendrils. There's a sudden rustling of dress pants, good coats, and suits. This whisper of fabric is indicative of movement; the congregation ripples as everyone stands, and the solemn voice of an organ makes the church reverberate with music. The priest, cloaked in deep purple, proceeds to the altar with two altar boys at his heels.

The mass has commenced in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Matt has been to mass enough times to know its sequence; he knows when to stand, he knows when to sit, when to kneel, and when to respond because the nuns at St. Agnes loomed over the orphanage kids with rulers in their hands. Today, most of his reactions are attributed to muscle memory, as if going to mass were some sort of weird classical conditioning. But he still remembers trying to keep awake in this very pew at the back of the church before the accident; he remembers his father nudging him awake, pinching him if his slumber was too deep, to at least make it seem like he was listening to the homily. And though Sunday mass was a constant, too-early pain, Ash Wednesday was the absolute worst because it meant waiting in line for fifteen minutes for a smear of something akin to coal powder.

But then the accident happened, and his father died, and he was left in the orphanage, and the nuns hit him with their rulers when he likened the blessed ashes to coal.

He resumes his seat when they begin reading tonight’s gospel. It’s something from Mathew, something about living the faith with humility, something about the dangers of self-righteousness. Your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Yeah. Something like that. Knowledge of Bible passages, he muses, is perhaps the only thing he gained from growing up in a Catholic orphanage. With that being said, Matthew 6:16, 16-18 is as poignant to him as his father’s pinching because he’s self-righteous and God says that’s wrong.

When the readings are finished, the priest takes to the pulpit again. His homily is brief, but nonetheless evocative. Remember you are dust, he quotes, and unto dust you shall return. His words wash over the congregation like the high tide, rapid and intense, and despite being repeated every year, the phrase still manages to _get_ people; the soon-to-be divorced woman, the anguished father, and the scared teenager, all now confident in God’s immensity, have cast their worries aside because if He can make humans from clay, then answering their prayers is not beyond Him and everything will be fine. Matt struggles with this, though, because it means he’s the coal powder of his childhood and can blown away by any sharp gust or washed away by a storm; it means he’s human, that he can’t do everything alone, that he can’t wage this one-man-war on crime, that he’s thinking too big.  
  
It’s here, in the presence of the Lord Himself, that he struggles with his faith. Everything he is, everything he stands for, in some way contradicts what he was brought up believing. Or, rather, what he was brought up _to believe_ because sometimes he takes communion with last night’s blood still on his hands and God, despite his immensity, shouldn’t be able to overlook sins that grave.  
  
Movement pervades the congregation again as people start lining up for the ashes. Matt waits for everyone in his pew to get in line before getting up himself. The scent of ashes from the last mass hangs in the air like a storm cloud. Like the frankincense, it’s heavy and earthy, but it also smells of fire and leaves. Repent and believe in the gospel, the priest says, dipping his thumb into the ashes and smearing it across Matt’s forehead, repent and believe in the gospel.

He sits back down with the scent of burnt palm leaves thick in his nose. The ashes are coarse with God’s mercy, his grandiosity. Repent and believe in the gospel, the priest said, repent and believe in the gospel because God is all-merciful and doesn't care about your bloody knuckles and self-righteous cause.

This is another concept Matt fails to wrap his mind around: if you sin, you can just repent. You can go to confession, confess your sins, and then you’re clean. You’re absolved, acquitted, exonerated, exculpated. It’s like he’s been charged with a crime and God is his hot-shot, Harvard alumni defense who works at that million-dollar firm in the city. But then, because he’s free to sin again, he commits another crime and gets brought before the law once more. But God is always there, and God is always good, and he’s yet to lose in court. And then the cycle repeats like Lent: Jesus wanders the desert for forty days, and Satan tries to tempt him again, but it doesn’t really matter because the liturgical calendar recapitulates, and Jesus always dies on the cross for the sins of humanity.  
  
The mass has ended, the priest announces after several contemplative minutes, go in peace. Then, the organ shakes the church again and the voices of the choir fill the air as the priest and his servers proceed down the aisle with a golden crucifix at their head. The congregation follows the cross, their faces ashen with the blessed ashes and their voices soft. Matt waits till the aisle clears to leave. He genuflects towards the altar, the red leather beneath his suit inhibiting his movements. The crucifix bobs above the throng of church-goers as if symbolizing Calvary. Matt doesn’t follow it, though; he leaves through the side entrance-- away from the crowd in the lobby, away from the merchants in the temple-- to evade Calvary, and pulls his cowl over his face at the expense of the ashes on his forehead.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like Lent is Matt's favorite liturgical season because it deals with repenting sins and lots of guilt. Idk, man, I just love Catholic!Matt because his religion and how it ties into his character is a very interesting facet to explore. Also, it takes a Catholic to know one, so I feel like I can kind of safely write about this subject. Tell me what you think!


End file.
